Monday morning, 9am. You reviewed the SaaS pitch. Strong team, decent metrics, interesting market. You scored it a 7.
Wednesday afternoon, 4pm. Same deck, same company. Less convincing team, moderate unit economics, crowded market. You scored it a 4.
What changed? Nothing about the company. Everything about you.
Daniel Kahneman spent years studying why professionals contradict themselves. Insurance underwriters shown identical cases gave premium quotes varying by 55%. Judges sentenced similar crimes differently based on whether they'd eaten lunch yet. Radiologists disagreed with their own diagnoses when shown the same X-ray weeks later.
This is noise. Your judgment right now is influenced by things that shouldn't matter: whether you're hungry, how the last pitch went, what email you just read, time of day.
The mechanism is invisible. You believe you're applying consistent criteria. But professionals using the same framework produce judgments that vary by 40-60% based on random factors. Monday morning you're fresh and optimistic. Wednesday afternoon you're tired from three meetings. Same opportunity, wildly different scores.
Three ways this shows up:
Your scoring drifts through the day. Morning evaluations trend more generous than afternoon ones. The score you give right after seeing a strong pitch is harsher than the score you'd give in isolation.
Partnership discussions make it worse, not better. Whoever speaks first anchors everyone else. The most confident voice wins. You leave thinking you reached consensus. Really you just matched whoever spoke first.
You're inconsistent about which companies need help. Some founders get too much intervention, others too little. The difference isn't their needs. It's your mood when you assessed them.
How to counter this:
Score independently first. Each partner evaluates separately, writes down their conviction rating before any discussion. This captures what you actually think before groupthink takes over.
Review big decisions twice. Strong yes at 4pm Tuesday? Look again at 10am Thursday. If your conviction holds, you're onto something. If it changes significantly, that's noise talking.
Track where you and your partners diverge. When scores differ by 2+ points on a 10-point scale, mark it. After 10 deals, patterns emerge. One partner always overweights market size. Another fixates on growth rate. These aren't investment philosophies. They're personal noise patterns you can learn to correct for.
The uncomfortable bit: most partnership disagreements aren't really about investment strategy. They're about people making random judgments based on factors they don't notice.
Simple test: Evaluate a deal today. Write down your score. Look at the same deck three days later without checking what you wrote. If your scores differ by more than 1 point, you've just found your noise.
I'm researching decision-making patterns in VC partnerships for my PhD work on behavioral finance. If you'd like to discuss what actually reduces judgment noise in practice, reach out. Always interested in hearing what works in real partnership dynamics.
